The Real Female Advantage

Turns out women don't manage differently from men after all -- they manage better. That's the conclusion of a persuasive new study of more than 1,000 managers by Lawrence A. Pfaff and Associates, a human-resources consulting firm in Kalamazoo, Mich. Unlike most such surveys, this one did not ask managers a set of loaded questions about their own personal characteristics and style -- "Are you intuitive or logical?" and the like. Rather, the evaluations were done by the people who reported to the managers and the people the managers reported to. In every one of the 20 categories showing a statistically significant difference between women and men, both bosses and employees gave female managers higher scores. What's more, the largest performance gaps between women and men were not in "soft" skills such as communication and teamwork but in areas like planning and decisiveness. Sorry, guys.